Continuing Humanitarian Crisis in Eastern Congo

The population of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has been suffering incredibly from war for more than a decade. Hopes were high that the elections would bring peace to the region - but the hopes have been dashed. The people are desparate. At the beginning of November more than 30 people, including several MONUC peacekeepers, were wounded during a demonstration by hundreds of civilians displaced by fighting in North Kivu.
The reason for the people's frustration is the insecurity that has threatened their lives for years. Just a few examples of the atrocities reported by MONUC in the course of July 2007:

• It was alleged that elements of the Bravo Brigade arbitrarily executed five male civilians from Kisharo village, Rutshuru Territory.
• Four villagers in Kisigari locality - between Goma and Rutshuru - were reportedly killed by FDLR troops in separate incidents.
• A FARDC soldier allegedly raped a Hutu woman and then chopped her to death, together with her three-month old baby, in Rutshuru Territory.
• A medical doctor was allegedly shot dead by armed men in uniform in Muranga, Goma.
• Five soldiers from the 2nd Integrated Brigade in Butembo, North Kivu, entered a local bar and extorted money from the patrons. One of the five, it is alleged, shot a young man who refused to hand over his motorbike.
• It is alleged that men wearing FARDC and PNC uniforms, accompanied by some armed civilians, raped a 16-year-old girl and a woman in the Keshero neighbourhood of Goma. According to the victims, the assailants also took mobile phones, around US$ 1,500, jewellery and food.
• The Katwiguru refugee camp, in the territory of Rutshuru, was allegedly looted by armed men in FARDC uniform.
• In Bukavu a civilian was shot dead by three PNC officers. According to reliable sources, the three PNC officers were robbing a private residence when the victim surprised them.
• Ten armed men in uniform, believed to be FDLR combatants, attacked Bulwe in Walungu Territory and abducted four women. The following day, the FARDC with the support of MONUC found two of the women, one of whom was dead and the other one seriously wounded.
• The localities of Bwuma and Kiwazi were burnt, it is alleged by the FDLR. An employee of the local Red Cross received serious bullet wounds as a result of an attack carried out on his private residence by Mai-Mai elements.
• Three FDLR/Rasta elements attacked the village of Nyabishaka, looted several houses, and also abducted two women.

Innumerable brutal crimes like these have been reported for years. A special problem has been that the frequency of sexual abuse is extremely high. Statis-tics are difficult to obtain. Between June 2006 and May 2007, 12,867 survivors of sexual violence were identified by UNICEF in eastern Congo; 4,222 of them were children (3,740 girls and 482 boys). In some villages, two thirds of all women are thought to have been raped, but until recently remaining silent was all that stood between the women and complete disgrace in the eyes of their families and communities. The stigma which is associated with having been raped is particularly strong in the Congo, especially for women who become pregnant as a result of the rape; the additional stigma of carrying the enemy's child makes it more likely that they will be abandoned by their families. In addition, many victims will never see a doctor, out of shame.
According to MSF, all armed groups have been involved in the widespread sexual violence. A Newsweek report in November 2006 estimated that 250,000 women were raped in that conflict, and thousands of them were injured severely. Often the perpetrators make sure that they do not kill the victim but inflict as much damage as possible. It is estimated that, by the end of 2007, the total number of rape cases requiring surgery will reach 450, compared with 250 in 2006. Given that many of the perpetrators are HIV positive, HIV/AIDS is rapidly becoming a concern for victims. In the first fortnight of September, MSF recorded a 100% increase in the incidence of rape.

Responsible Parties
The rebel movements that are the main source of insecurity and human rights violations operate broadly all over the region because of the complex alliances promoted by the military regimes that dominate the political landscape.
The FARDC is the national army. Apart from them, four main groups are responsible for the continued insecurity in South Kivu: the FDLR and the Rastas; insurgents or "dissidents"; armed Banyamulenge fighters who refused to join the national army; and elements of the Mai-Mai, a former Congolese militia group that has largely been absorbed into government forces.
The president of the FDLR, Dr. Ignace Murwanashyaka, who is based in Germany, said that former Congolese president Laurent Kabila supplied his group with arms. He is accused by Rwanda of being one of the persons responsible for the 1994 genocide. It is estimated that the FDLR has 9,000 fighters. They collect taxes and have instituted a reign of terror on the Congolese population in areas they control.
General Laurent Nkunda, a Tutsi who was born in Rutshuru, sees himself as the protector of his co-ethnics, especially the Banyamulenge, whom he wants to protect from "extermination". Nkunda has an estimated force of 4,000 men based primarily in Masisi, North Kivu, and has refused to integrate his men into the regular army; he claims political leadership of his own movement, the CNDP, and has set up a parallel administration in Masisi, installing his supporters in administrative, police, and intelligence services. Rwanda allegedly supplies him with ammunition and fighters. Nkunda accuses the FARDC of supporting the FDLR in their fight against him.
Then there are local Congolese factions or armed groups, such as the Rasta and Mai-Mai, whose composition is unclear. Residents say the Rasta are a combination of Kinyarwanda-speaking bandits and Congolese with no political agenda, their only objective being to rob and plunder the civilian population.
Government policy towards the FDLR has followed a confusing and contradictory course, with the army sometimes supporting, sometimes attacking this group composed largely of Rwandan combatants. The FDLR is supposedly committed to overthrowing the current government of Rwanda, but in recent years its members have attacked Congolese civilians more than they have engaged the Rwandan military.
The shifting configurations of the conflict in the past year have seen all forces variously fighting each other: Nkunda's forces fighting the Congolese army, the FDLR fighting the Congolese army, and Nkunda's forces (under Congolese army authority in "mixed brigades" as well as separately) fighting the FDLR. The Mai-Mai fighters under Kabamba have carried out operations with the FDLR against Nkunda.
In January 2007, the Congolese government tried to integrate rebel troops into the national army to form mixed brigades; one of them is the Bravo Brigade. It is claimed that hundreds of those once under Nkunda's command left the units to which they had been assigned under mixage and rejoined Nkunda's forces. Due to the failure of attempts to integrate Nkunda's troops into the army permanently, the crisis has become much worse since May 2007. After the most recent call for "brassage", by October of 2007, 750 of Nkunda's men had surrendered; of these, 500 had been transferred to camps for the merger process. Furthermore, 800 Mai-Mai fighters from the Jackson Group also turned themselves in and were gathered at Lubero.
Renewed fighting flared up on 25th August, 2007, between the troops of General Nkunda and both FDLR and FADRC in Masisi and the Virunga National Park.

People Forced to Leave their Home
The FARDC troops, especially the Bravo Brigade deployed in Rutshuru Territory, commonly attack and abuse civilians, saying that the civilians are FDLR supporters. The FDLR then conducts reprisals against the people.
Thousands of people flee their villages when the army or rebels attack them, and try to find protection in refugee camps - according to UN estimates at least 437,000 civilians have been displaced in North Kivu in one year since the end of 2006. But they are not secure in the camps either. Officials running three of the six displaced persons camps at Mugunga, 15 km from Goma, reported that women are raped in the camps or outside when they go to fetch water or wood, allegedly by the FARDC. People fleeing the fighting in Sake, west of Goma, set up these camps in Mugunga, next to the Virunga National Park; one of them, the Lac Vert Camp, is partly located within the park.
An NGO reported that in eastern Congo there were "several thousand" children in the army, in rebel groups and in foreign armed groups. All parties to the conflict in North Kivu have used children, but since the beginning of the most recent fights the number of recruitments has risen dramatically. The children are recruited in refugee camps and schools; the FDLR also sweeps villages and takes all the children with them. Forced recruitment of adults is widespread too; frequently, young men who resist or escape are subsequently executed.

Business
Much of the fighting is driven by the desire to control natural resources, and many Congolese believe control of the lucrative regional trade networks is the real reason for the war. A study by the Goma-based Pole Institute puts official exports - mostly tin, tungsten and quinine - from Goma in 2006 at US$ 32 million, while imports totalled US$ 108 million. Rich countries in America and Europe have been directing this trade too, as the UN Security Council documented in 2001 to 2003.
Weapons and munitions have continued to flow into the Great Lakes Region and to those forces known to flagrantly abuse human rights in eastern Congo. They are transported across the borders or arrive in airplanes and are allegedly paid with minerals, animal products like ivory, and timber from eastern Congo. It is difficult to find out details of this trade, and it is dangerous to propagate confidential information in general. Journalists have been arrested, threatened, tortured and even murdered if they published critical reports. Influential persons are earning enormous sums of money with lucrative illegal businesses, and are willing to prevent others from disturbing their activities by any means at their disposal.

Who Is Involved?

Banyamulenge: Congolese Tutsi pastoralists of Rwandan origin living in the highlands of South Kivu.
Brassage: The process of integrating former belligerent troops into a new national army (FARDC) by breaking up groups formed along ethnic, political and regional lines, and dispersing them throughout the country.
CNDP: Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defense of the People). Political movement of the dissident general Laurent Nkunda (who broke ranks with the Congolese army in December 2003), unveiled in July 2006.
FAR: Forces Armées du Rwanda. Former Rwandan army (under Habyarimana), which fled to Congo after the 1994 genocide.
FARDC: Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the name used for the Congolese national army since the beginning of the transition.
FDLR: Forces Démocratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), Rwandan Hutu rebel group formed in 2000 that emerged from the FAR and members of the Interahamwe who fled Rwanda after the genocide. Today, most FDLR combatants play no role in the genocide. Some are too young and others are Congolese who joined the groups.
Interahamwe: An extremist Rwandan Hutu militia group that was responsible for the bulk of the 1994 genocide.
Mai-Mai: Local militia, mostly in eastern Congo.
MONUC: Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), UN peacekeeping force.
MSF: Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), international organisation of doctors for emergency medical aid.
PNC: Police Nationale Congolaise (national police force).
Rastas: Dissident FDLR faction

Summary of information from various sources by Angela Meder. Reports and documents with details on the situation in eastern Congo are available from the following organizations, among others: Global Witness, Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group (Congo page), Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders ), MONUC, OCHA, Pole Institute, Refugees International (Congo page), United Nations Security Council.

Some reports: Human Rights Watch 2007: Renewed Crisis in North Kivu. Directly to the PDF download (644 KB); Amnesty International published a report on the mass rape of women in 2004 already, in 2005 on the suffering of the population, 2005 on the origins of the weapons as well as many new documents; a study of the Pole Institute on the trade with resources (French); Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict published Struggling to Survive: Children in Armed Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006.

On the situation of women:
The Shame of War: sexual violence against women and girls in conflict. United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; earth print EP-Lib 2007. 137 Seiten, Paperback, 25 US-Dollar. ISBN 92-1-132025-9

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